Consolation
by Two four twelve
Summary: A challenge fic. Malfoy decides to cheer Ginny up after two losses, in his own characteristic way. Obviously AU.


_AN: This is for the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition round two. Loosely inspired by lyrics from Mary Lambert's _This Heart_, it also contains the prompts Weakness, Pretence, and "But would you have it any other way?" Like my previous entry in that competition, Life, this is set in my Honeyverse, although both are close enough to canon-compliant. Take it as being a rather more violent fifth year._

The Great Lake was still liquid but only a few degrees above freezing. The sky was overcast, a woolly ceiling giving neither real light nor real shadow. The trees at the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest were shedding their russet leaves; a few owls hunted or played among them.

Ginny sat on a boulder jutting out into the Lake, trying to skip rocks. She was in a black mood, oppressed by a vicious cycle: she knew she didn't have any mature reason for her anger, and this led to self-contempt. She tried to work this off by skipping stones, but she'd never tried it before and her mood wasn't conducive to learning, so she kept sinking the rocks on their first bounce. This was so frustratingly pathetic enough that it just made her angrier. After a quarter of an hour, she gave it up, pulled out her wand, and began trying to cast curses at the water, but she couldn't even concentrate well enough to do that.

"What on Earth are you doing?"

She started hard enough to drop her wand. It clattered against her rock and fell into the Lake.

"You idiot," she snapped at the newcomer. "Look what you made me do. That was my _wand_."

"Klutz," said Malfoy, but in a half-hearted way, as though he wanted to be nasty but just couldn't summon the energy. He was still swathed in bandages, and unlike that time two years previously, these ones looked necessary. She could make out angry red scar tissue around them, on his neck and arms, and they probably all over his torso and leg, too. He was limping hard enough, and leaning on what looked like his father's cane.

"How can you just ignore it?" she went on. "That's my _wand_. Those things are expensive."

Malfoy gave her an incredulous look. "I tip buskers for less than the cost of a wand," he told her. She turned red, either in anger or in shame. "And honestly, it's a wooden wand. It floats."

"How do you expect me to retrieve it?" Ginny asked. "I'd freeze to death in this weather if I tried to swim."

Malfoy rolled his eyes. "You really are useless, aren't you? _Accio Gingersnap's wand_." It shot up into his cane hand; he offered it to her. "Help me up, will you?"

Normally, she would have refused, but he had just done her a favour. On the other hand, it was his fault in the first place. Then again, he had probably saved her life from that fire last month … but he had been saving his own skin as much as hers. She decided to be the bigger person and offered her hand; he awkwardly scrambled up onto the rock beside her.

"Whatever happened to calling me Sheasley?" she asked.

"It makes me think of your brothers too much," Malfoy said. "I'm impressed you're so … that you're not worse adjusted, with those three."

"I have six brothers, actually," she said. "The three eldest have graduated."

Malfoy shook his head. "Your poor mother. What are you doing out here, anyway? Other than dropping things."

"What do you think?" she asked acidly. He'd almost seemed civilised, for a whole sentence that time.

"If I had to guess, I'd say you're upset that you couldn't salvage that last match," Malfoy said perceptively. "Normally players prefer to hang out with each other after getting so badly flattened, but you have all three brothers on your team, and that _harpy_ as Captain, so probably you're worried they wouldn't be much comfort."

"If you're only here to rub it in, I could always go back to dropping things into the Lake," said Ginny. She gave him a rather predatory look.

Malfoy sketched the top of the rock with his wand, cutting some pebbles free, so they could go on skipping. "Do you remember two years ago, when I lost to your precious Potter? I expect it was a similar feeling for you. Watching helplessly as your teammates let in goal after goal, knowing it was down to you to save the game with an early catch but just not being able to find the damn Snitch anywhere … it's the sort of thing one has nightmares about."

She turned away and threw a stone. "And you didn't even have the consolation of catching the Snitch," she said lightly. She had no idea how to deal with him. Usually he was just an obnoxious bully, but sometimes he played weirdly nice, and it would be tasteless not to reciprocate, but he'd always pepper his speech with passive-aggressive insults and veiled blood slurs. Realistically, she'd probably be doing everyone a favour if she just pushed him into the Lake. At least he'd stopped singing _Witches, Curses, Money _at every opportunity.

"True," said Malfoy. He'd been too burnt to play. "Of course, I didn't have to put up with such a long game. You poor thing," he added unconvincingly.

"What do you want?" she asked. She threw another stone; it splashed and sank immediately.

"Hm. I'd quite like to be the next Minister for Magic," Malfoy said ruminatively. "And to have my own Firebolt, and a few Veela masseuses, and…"

Ginny shot him a glare. "Why are you _here, now_. Are you just here to gloat about winning, knowing that I won't hex you, not after Hogsmeade?"

"I thought about it," Malfoy said honestly, "and I won't pretend not to have a weakness for a spot of Gryffindor-baiting, but to tell you the truth, I've just been feeling _bored_. My Slytherin friends are all so _predictable_. It doesn't help that half of them are in detention or St. Mungo's. Or, in that one case, the morgue."

It really had been an awful fire. Ginny repressed a shiver. "What about your girlfriend?"

"Who?" he asked.

"You know," she said impatiently. "Parkinson."

"Parkinson is," Malfoy said, and paused. "The best company a man could ever ask for, as long as he's deaf and, ideally, blind."

"I got the same impression," said Ginny, thinking back to the last time she'd seen the older girl. Parkinson had been mocking a Hufflepuff first-year who'd looked close to tears until Ginny intervened with a precise Bat Bogey Hex. "Is there really not a single interesting person in Slytherin?"

"There's always Greengrass, I suppose," he granted, "but she doesn't give me the time of day."

Ginny threw another stone. It bounced once. "And I do?"

"For a start," Malfoy asked. He slipped his arms around her and pulled her onto his lap. She froze for a moment, but let him kiss her. It was long minutes before she pulled away.

"You know, I do have a boyfriend," she said, sitting beside him.

"And?" Malfoy asked.

"And good girls don't let boys who aren't their boyfriend kiss them," Ginny said, "especially not a boy who already has a girlfriend … and a really horrible one at that." That being said, he was a much better kisser than Michael. Apparently Parkinson was useful for something other than ballast after all.

"Good blood traitor girls don't touch pureblood boys, either," Malfoy said indifferently.

"That's a fair point," Ginny said. "If my brothers ever find out, they'll be furious." She had a brief, happy mental image of Ron swearing incoherently.

"I'm not a healthy interest for you, obviously," he said. "But would you have it any other way?"

"Since when do you like me, anyway?" she asked.

"I have a thing for girls who can't stand me," Malfoy replied.

"Apparently," she said. "You know, if I tell that trollop Parkinson about this, she's castrate you."

"No, she won't," he said. "I'll tell her you came on to me. Problem solved."

Ginny rolled her eyes. She dusted herself down and hopped off to walk back to the castle, not bothering to say goodbye.

"Hey, at least you aren't sulking over Quidditch any more," Malfoy called after her. She huffed, blowing some loose hair out of her face, and smiled.

.. ... ...

Four months later found her on that same rock. After two months had been the attack on the Ministry, and they had formally acknowledged the return of You-Know-Who. Two months later, the war had come to Hogwarts.

"What are you doing?"

Malfoy was finally out of his bandages. It was Ginny's turn to be injured; her stomach and forearms were wrapped in sterile gauze. He scooted onto the boulder beside her, and automatically wrapped his arms around her. She leant into him. They were silent for a few minutes.

"I'm sorry," he said at length.

"That's a first," she said.

"About your brothers," he clarified.

"Yeah," said Ginny, staring into the Lake. The Giant Squid sat in the middle of it, gently undulating. It certainly didn't care what went on in the school. "I miss them."

They stared for a minute more.

"Did you?" she asked. "Lose anyone, I mean. You must have had friends in the first wave."

"Yeah," said Malfoy. "Don't really want to talk about it."

"They'll probably close the school," said Ginny.

"If they don't," said Malfoy. "If they don't … I've had enough of this pretence, Gingersnap."

There was a paddling of ducks on the far edge of the water. One was angrily quacking at another.

"I know we don't … always get along," he said, which was true: they broke up or exchanged hexes at least twice a week. "But I do really like you."

"Yeah," she said.

"I know it saves us a few problems," he went on, "but … I don't like us being secret. Do you want to just tell everyone?"

"What about your family?" Ginny asked dully. "And mine, for that matter."

"Heh," said Malfoy. "I don't think that's going to be much of a problem, not any more."

"Oh?"

"My father used to tell me exciting stories of the Death Eaters, when I was little," he said reminiscently. "About outsmarting the DMLE and Dumbledore and who knows who else. And I thought it sounded fantastic. But he never told me about people dying. Kind of ironic, really, for an organisation called the _Death_ Eaters, but there you are. Seeing that battle … you know what? Sod that."

"What about you?" Ginny asked. "Are you still a blood purist?"

"The Malfoy family is older than Hogwarts," Malfoy said. "It'll be over ten times my age if I live to a hundred. It's _bigger_ than me. That doesn't, that can't mean nothing. That history and the ideals of wizarding nobility matter, and I do truly care for them, no matter how many Light families say it's just verdigris and arrogance. Yes, I'm a blood purist, and I think you're honestly wrong to not be. I guess all I'm trying to say is, I'm not willing to die or kill for it … but I am willing to live for it."

They sat for a minute longer.

"And what does your father say about that?" Ginny finally asked.

"Good god, you don't think I'd tell _him_ that, do you?" Malfoy asked, horrified. "I don't fancy being disowned, thank you very much."

Ginny chuckled, stretched, stood up, and hopped off the boulder. "You have the weirdest ways of cheering me up, you know," she said.

He followed her and offered his arm; she took it. "'Those cunning Slytherins / Use any means to achieve their ends'. I'll tell him I'm just trying to annoy Potter."

"You do realise Harry doesn't care either way, right?"

"And?"


End file.
